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Influenza 2020/2021

NCT04546854 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 200

Last updated 2020-09-25

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

As part of the fight against COVID-19, the UK government has announced its most comprehensive flu campaign to date (https://www.gov.uk/government/news/most-comprehensive-flu-programme-in-uk-history-will-be-rolled-out-this-winter). This should not be surpising: every year NHS hospitals experience an overwhelming number of influenza cases, and COVID-19 increases this concern. As in previous years, the flu vaccine is free at the point of care for people 65 and over. New this year is that later in the season the vaccine will be made available free at the point of care for people 50 and over. However, if people refuse to take the vaccine this comprehensive program cannot benefit public health.

The degree to which vaccine hesitancy is expressed varies across characteristics of the vaccine considered and the time and place it is offered, and across characteristics of the person's perceptions of complacency, convenience, confidence, calculations, and communal responsibility, i.e. the "5Cs". Information campaigns can be used to influence all 5Cs, and public facing information is often a necessary component of public health campaigns that may also include structural components. Largely, information campaigns can be viewed as a type of educational intervention.

Educational interventions may fall short of what is needed to alter people's intentions to vaccinate where they focus on system 1 rational thinking processes and neglect system 2 automatic thinking processes. To be more effective, public health messages must be tailored to align with the "beliefs, attitudes, and motivations" of the very people they intend to influence.

Fact-led educational interventions to increase parents' intentions to vaccinate their children are particularly ineffective where more subtle content opposes the recipient's deep-seated values. In a different context, recycling behaviour, previous research demonstrated that messages aligned with people's deep-seated values (i.e. the moral foundations that underlie political ideologies) are more likely to promote desired behavioural intentions than unaligned messages.

The present research expands the scope of previous research in two ways. First, rather than investigating parental attitudes towards vaccination, the investigators will look at people's intentions to self-vaccinate. Second, the investigators will explore the effectiveness of messages aligned with the moral foundations that underlie individual's political ideologies on their intentions to be vaccinated.

Conditions

  • Influenza Vaccine

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Appeals

Written text motivating participants to take up the seasonal influenza vaccination

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • University of Warwick

    lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
OTHER
Masking
DOUBLE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
50 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2020-09-21
Primary Completion
2020-09-21
Completion
2020-09-21

Countries

  • United Kingdom

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT04546854 on ClinicalTrials.gov